One week from tonight the top Democratic presidential candidates will gather once again, for another televised debate. There will be fewer of them on the stage this time around, since as of this writing only seven of them have qualified. After the first of the new year, the debate schedule will accelerate, as we'll get four debates in January and February, one in each of the early-voting states. Taken together, these five debates may be the most influential yet, since voters will assumably be paying more attention. But throughout the whole process, my metric has always been to picture each of the candidates on a stage not with their fellow Democrats, but with Donald Trump. Because that is precisely what they're all vying for -- the chance to take on Trump in the general election.

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Occasionally, I like to take a look far down the road in an effort to see long-term political dynamics that others may be missing. I'm often accused of taking too long a look when I do. But I have to admit, a story today in Politico brought forth the same reaction from me, because it is concerned with the dynamics of Joe Biden's re-election effort, in 2024. I'll pause for a moment while you digest that one.

The gist of the article is that Biden is privately considering the possibility of only being a one-term president, by choice. This, of course, skips over the entire 2020 nomination process and general election, but it is couched in a contemporary question: should Biden now pre-emptively announce that if elected, he will only serve one term? After all, should he be elected, he will be 82 years old at the end of his first term in office. Is America ready for its first octogenarian president?

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Today, House Democrats unveiled two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump. This is a historic development, since it has only previously happened on three other occasions. Somewhat surprisingly, the Democrats opted to only focus very narrowly in the charges they brought, limiting them to the fallout from Trump's attempt to get the Ukrainian government to do opposition research on a political opponent. Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership made a decision in drafting such narrowly-focused articles, since they had the option of including other obviously-impeachable offenses, but in the end chose not to.

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This isn't a real column, I fully realize, so my apologies in advance for that. But I had to spend time today catching up on getting ready for the holiday season, so I just didn't have the time. I did listen to a fair amount of today's hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee, but it all seemed like more of a rehash than anything new, so I don't really have much more to say about it than that for the moment.

Instead, today I am throwing the nomination process open for our annual year-end "McLaughlin Awards." I am going to commit to publishing these on December 20th and 27th, the final two Fridays of the year. With such a short holiday season, I just don't think it's possible to move that up to starting with our awards this Friday, so we'll have one final Friday Talking Points column of the year before the awards. That's the plan, even if it does mean I'll be real busy the two days after Christmas. I have no idea what other columns will be appearing this month, so stay tuned for other updates.

A few years back, I decided to ask for input into the awards categories, and this has worked out pretty well -- I've gotten some brilliant suggestions in the comments section that I had completely forgotten about. So I made it a tradition along with the columns themselves. Which brings us to this year's prizes.

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The impeachment train is rolling right on down the track, and nothing's going to stop it now. That was the big news this week, without question. This has all been happening at breathtaking speed, when you consider the usual glacial pace of things getting done in Washington. Just this week, the House Intelligence Committee put out its report on impeachment, handed it off to the Judiciary Committee, who then held their first hearing, and by week's end Nancy Pelosi was calling for articles of impeachment to be drafted so that the House could vote on them in time for the Christmas break. That all happened in one week.

Of course, Pelosi has had complete control over the timing of all of this, and she is gambling that moving faster rather than slower is going to work out better for Democrats. This decision is already being second-guessed -- and likely will in the future, as well. Pelosi could have chosen a different path, but she has signaled that the impeachment train will continue on the fast track.

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There is good news for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot who espouse progressive policy positions, according to a recent poll cited by today's Washington Post. But even putting it like that buys in to a rather enormous falsehood that both the media as a whole and the Republican Party would dearly like us all to believe. For decades now, they've been beating the drum of "the American public is center-right," when it is just not true (if indeed it ever was). You see this in the constant framing of Democratic candidates in the media as "too far left" or "going hard left" or "dangerously left ideas" or any of the other myriad of misdirection the media routinely loves to push. As this poll stunningly reveals, this is absolutely false because the wide mainstream of political thought in the public at large is actually currently somewhere between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, on the political ideology scale.

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Today, I watched some more daytime television. Eight-and-a-half hours of it, to be precise. Because it was time once again to view gavel-to-gavel coverage of an event that has only taken place three (or four, if you count Nixon) times in our nation's history: the impeachment of a sitting U.S. president. The House Intelligence Committee wrapped up its work for now by voting on and making public their report on their findings of fact, and by doing so handed the impeachment inquiry off to the House Judiciary Committee. Which held its first public hearing today by opening with four constitutional scholars as witnesses.

Three of these witnesses were invited by the majority Democrats, and one by the minority Republicans. As with the Intelligence Committee hearings, both Democrats and Republicans were given ample time to question these witnesses, beginning with a 45-minute segment largely devoted to questions from staff lawyers and followed by individual 5-minute question segments from each of the 41 members of the committee. Which is, of course, why it took so long to watch.

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Yes, Virginia, it's that time of year again....

Although every week feels like a month these days (what with the constant firehose of ridiculousness emanating from the White House), we're finally approaching the end of the calendar year. Less than a year from now will be the 2020 election, and a little over a year from now, if things go well, we'll all return to some semblance of sanity. But to get from here to there together, we've got to keep the lights on here at ChrisWeigant.com.

As usual, we are throwing ourselves on the mercy of our readers to raise the necessary money to continue providing reality-based political commentary here on a daily basis. The site has been ad-free for years now, and we really would like to continue that streak (because we hate ads as much as you do). Also as usual, we are softening the blow of our blatant begging by mesmerizing you with the cuteness of Christmas kittens!

Meow!

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We haven't formally taken the pulse of the Democratic campaign for a month now, so we thought it was time to dive back into the numbers.

In the intervening time, we've seen the total Democratic field (everyone who has run, even if they've subsequently dropped out) grow to a record-setting 29 candidates, although, thankfully, the number of active candidates is now down to "only" 16 left in the race. With so many left to still cover, let's just move right along and break them down one by one.

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Some days, the humor just writes itself. Today, our illustrious president proved once again (as if any doubt remained) that he is, in fact, dumber than a bag of hammers. At a signing ceremony to proclaim a new centennial coin for the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment next year (women got the right to vote in 1920), Donald Trump mused aloud why this hadn't happened previously. Previous presidents, according to Trump, just didn't know how to get things done, which is why they hadn't proclaimed this centennial before now.

In other words, Trump was mystified why the 100th anniversary of an event hadn't taken place earlier than the 100th anniversary of that event. At this point, even bags of hammers are laughing at his idiocy.

I considered writing a spoof of other centennials Trump could get ahead of the curve on (such as: "Trump announces that LGBT people shouldn't have to wait another 50 years for the centennial of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, but in trying to make it more inclusive Trump just proved his cluelessness even further, by proclaiming it the bi-centennial"). But that seemed like too much work for not enough return. After all, these jokes just write themselves, and I'm sure we'll see plenty of them on the late-night shows tonight.

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